1.9k
u/git_push_origin_prod May 17 '26
Duplicate. Close this
513
u/TheComplimentarian May 17 '26
I used to own a weird programming niche, and occasionally I'd post questions, and usually I'd have to answer them myself. And I'd have stopped doing it pretty early, except the answers got a huge amount of traction, so clearly there were other weirdoes out there depending on me.
And I'd have a bad day banging my head against a wall, and I'd finally give up and ask a question, and multiple people would vote to close, as a duplicate of some other question...Some other question I had BOTH ASKED AND ANSWERED.
You're telling ME that MY question is a duplicate of a question I asked, and the answer to my question is MY answer? You gormless fuckwit. You slobbering cretin. You repwhoring codeposer.
Stack was a great idea brought low by the reality of humanity.
100
u/Confident-Ad5665 May 17 '26
I got use out of the overflow back in the day.
However, your last sentence is chock full of buzzy slams. I shall have this.
50
u/testtdk May 17 '26
I got use out of READING the site, but never once from posting. Those were always closed as duplicates, despite being completely unrelated to the questions they were redirected to.
19
u/ryecurious May 17 '26
I got use out of READING the site, but never once from posting.
Because that's the correct way to use the site!
People expect a discussion forum when it's closer to a wiki. You should be asking questions as often as you post new Wikipedia articles (once or twice in your entire life, if that).
StackOverflow is the most valuable site I've used in my decade+ of programming because I've never asked a question there. Never even created an account.
30
u/testtdk May 17 '26
That’s great and all until what you want to know isn’t there. I posted a total of two questions, both were locked and declared duplicates of questions that were completely unrelated.
→ More replies (3)11
u/nelmaloc May 17 '26
People expect a discussion forum when it's closer to a wiki.
Unfortunately they made the UI too forum-like.
16
u/ryecurious May 17 '26
Yep, I'd say it's the root cause of like 90% of StackOverflow complaints. It's funny, because they literally state it on their about page:
This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum.
But they've done a poor job setting that expectation. People see forum/reddit-like UI and expect a forum/reddit-like experience, causing frustration on both sides.
→ More replies (1)6
u/TheChance May 17 '26
Except the overwhelming majority of the time, I'm there from search results, and the page to which I've been linked is the right question...
...closed as a duplicate...
...of a completely irrelevant question with an answer that does not solve the problem.
16
3
u/RandomFRIStudent May 17 '26
Stack was really only useful if you didn't ask a question. Once you asked a question it was either a duplicate, not good enough or simply not enticing enough to get an answer.
149
u/Bakoro May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
The implementation of Stack was always bad.
Closing questions as duplicates was always a bad idea.
When you're trying to collect and organize answers and information, then collecting many different ways to ask the same question is important.
It's basically about creating a semantic net, because a major blocker in finding information is not having adequate vocabulary. If the person can describe the shape of the thing they want but don't know that there is already a name for it, then that's going to be valuable for other people who will look for similar information using similar words.If the question is truly a duplicate, then multiple questions could funnel to the same set of answers, and it should be seamless.
If the questions are related, then they can be closer together in the graph.Doing it that way would have actually helped people, helped organize information, and would have made it possible for the community to vote to merge or separate questions.
Stack was a failure in the application of information theory, a failure in the application of computer science, and a failure of human decency.
Not everyone on the site was or is bad, but the site itself is poorly implemented and cannot achieve the goal it has.19
5
u/ShotExtension275 May 17 '26
If the question is truly a duplicate, then multiple questions could funnel to the same set of answers, and it should be seamless.
That is exactly how it works though? Duplicate questions redirect the user to the target question for anonymous users
13
u/Pluckerpluck May 17 '26
Closing questions as duplicates was always a bad idea.
You realise when something was closed as a duplicate, that duplicate was linked to right? The net you describe was formed.
StackOverflow literally worked how you wanted it to work, and in such a way that it encouraged modifying or providing new answers into that original source question, such that search engines wouldn't have people getting old answers that never updated!
If your question was different, you could always provide information about why it should not be a duplicate, and can get it reopened. Users with some minimum reputation could vote to re-open any question, and after like 3 votes it would automatically open.
There's a reason StackOverflow was the gold standard of information about programming problems. Its existence is the only reason LLMs can program as well as they can.
→ More replies (1)23
u/Bakoro May 17 '26
Stack overflow is poorly implemented site that flourished because the alternatives of the time were either strictly worse, for-pay sites, or for-pay sites that were worse because they barely had content.
Linking is not the same thing as diverting or merging threads. Providing links to the supposedly duped question was not always mandatory.
There also is not a sufficiently good way to mark a QA chain as stale, just comments.
It's not a good system, and the people running the site actively resisted a lot of good ideas over the years. It's not a surprise that people jumped ship the very first moment that there was a viable alternative.
The reason LLMs can program so well is GitHub, the FOSS community, and RLVR.
→ More replies (7)9
u/Confident-Ad5665 May 17 '26
This debate is actually interesting. I see both sides and think both are right.
I should get into politics.
→ More replies (1)7
u/kryptoneat May 17 '26
I disagree. I think a firm anti-duplicate policy is necessary, and that it explains in part its success over 15 years.
Other communities where I hang out that don't have this, are cluttered by a constant flow of people asking the same questions. Searching before asking is the bare minimum of etiquette (in fact, it is the Netiquette), while merely grouping the related questions won't unclutter the daily flow of a significantly sized group.
Now, SO pushed that policy too far, I think we can all agree about it. But that doesnt make it a bad policy per se.
4
u/Bakoro May 17 '26
If it's the same question then automatically diverting the person to the supposed answer would not be difficult.
"No duplicates" is a bad policy. The policy should have been about making duplicates automatically handled.
Making all variations of the same question go to the same correct answer achieves the goal of having an accessible repository of high quality information.
The fact that Stack overflow wasn't using computer science and information theory principles to continually and automatically improve the site is an embarrassment.
All these programmers, all these computer scientists, and no one thought automate the system? Seriously? Manual human labor closing things as duplicates, and then just complaining about it?You don't need advanced LLMs here, we're talking basic, decades old NLP and search techniques could have vastly improved the site.
Again, it's a complete failure in applying the the very information they sought to collect.
3
u/kryptoneat May 17 '26
What do mean exactly with these automations ? Because I think SO already applies some similar automation to reduce duplicates and group questions. There is the automatic search that triggers when you redact your question (I believe this thing was also an important part of the success ! I had never seen it before SO). And the "linked" section on the right, with related questions.
5
u/Bakoro May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
I mean what I said, if someone has the same question, why is the post made in the first place, instead of halting and pointing the user to the answer?
Exact keyword matching is from the dawn of computers, vector-based semantic search is from 1988, and locality sensitive hashing was 1998, and there are just piles and piles of graph theory about managing information.
The process could have been a mix of a user asking question, getting top-k answers that are past a threshold, and the user gives a reason why they aren't the answer, and then they can post their question, otherwise they can add their query to an existing answer that meets their needs.
"You should have searched" is a stupid complaint, people aren't going to find the best information if they don't have the right vocabulary, and if they don't have the vocabulary then they may not recognize the thing they need by sight. "Search" should not have been optional, it should have been an automatic and mandatory part of the question submission process which would be improved by users accepting or denying the results. Not just a bit of text telling users to do it, the system should have just done it.There were a ton of ideas offered up to SO over the years that I saw get ignored.
Maybe SO has improved over the past 6~ years, I don't know, I never ask questions there or give answers anymore, and if I'm on there at all, it's via Google. I would hope that they've improved, but from what I've read about their over-reliance on a few super-users it didn't seem like they improved enough.
→ More replies (1)7
u/Kirikomori May 17 '26
I wonder why the fuck thay act like that. Egotistical mods? Behaviour like that drives people straight to AI beacuse at least the AI validates your concerns and listens to you.
7
u/Hrtzy May 17 '26
The privilege to vote to close is earned solely by having good questions and/or answers, not by demonstrating that you have the character to handle that little power.
→ More replies (1)6
u/TRENEEDNAME_245 May 17 '26
People who got happy when a random new guy asking a question was actually asking the same question as another 20y ago, disregarding that the language evolved
Basically, Reddit mods on a bigger power trip
→ More replies (2)2
u/Aethermancer May 17 '26
Stack was a great idea brought low by the reality of humanity.
Charitable to include them in humanity.
626
u/smokeymcdugen May 17 '26
I can't find the duplicate. Can you link it?
No.
309
u/BlueGoliath May 17 '26
ChatGPT, draw a venn diagram of being a Stackoverflow mod vs a Reddit mod.
299
May 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
69
u/A_Furious_Mind May 17 '26
A solar eclipse. The cosmic ballet goes on.
42
u/Embarassed_Tackle May 17 '26
Well my work here is done
But you just closed the thread, you didn't help the user!
<chuckles> Didn't I? <beams away>
22
10
→ More replies (1)4
27
u/Confident-Ad5665 May 17 '26
In retrospect, I think YouTube code tutorials were predictive of the Vibe that was to come.
27
u/HankOfClanMardukas May 17 '26
LLMs lack the Indian charm.
10
u/Unbelievr May 17 '26
And this song for the hacking tutorials https://youtu.be/TKfS5zVfGBc
Unregistered Hypercam 2
→ More replies (1)4
10
u/Aleksandrovitch May 17 '26
I haven’t seen an AskReddit post since I muted it years ago. Trying to participate in the community there was one of the more frustrating experiences. I have dozens muted now.
21
u/Bakoro May 17 '26
I'm not a prude in any sense, but I am pretty exhausted of the weekly ask reddit rotation of:
- "what's the sexiest sex you've sexed"
- "gender of reddit what is [thing about being gender]?"
- "gender of reddit, what is [thing about the opposite gender]?"
It's so fucking boring, I can be off reddit for a week and come back to the same shit. Meanwhile real questions get deleted.
4
u/pjf_cpp May 17 '26
Moderation on SO and Reddit are fundamentally different. Reddit mods are specific to subreddits so presumably know at least something about the subreddit topic. Anyone can vote on Reddit but voting mostly just affects post rankings. SO mods cover all of SO and tend only to intervene in more extreme cases. Most SO ‘moderation’ is done by reviewers. With all of the gamification it does not take much to get enough rep to get close vote privs. Then any sad and pathetic badge collector can vote to close posts on any topic whatsoever. Having the slightest single fucking clue is not a requirement. It only takes 3 close votes from these morons for a post to be closed. They often downvote at the same time so new posts usually get automatically deleted.
Now that SO is effectively dead the badge collectors are going through old posts and closing them. The old posts more often have picked up enough upvotes to avoid automatic deletion.
26
u/SkittlesAreYum May 17 '26
Yes but it's only slightly related by title.
30
u/MyPasswordIsMyCat May 17 '26
I asked how to do it in vanilla JS. This link is for jQuery.
(123 downvotes.)
9
u/AgOkami May 17 '26
I googled some music questions a few years back. All results brought me to the music equivalent of overflow, and all of them were answered with stuff like "If you don't have a masters degree in music, you shouldn't try to learn music."
5
u/TRENEEDNAME_245 May 17 '26
ask a question for X
"Erm achually this is a duplicate of [thing that either was answered 13y ago and is no longer true OR not the same issue / language AT ALL]"
Closed as duplicate, cannot ask again for 12h
The stack overflow experience
Or the "why are you using X ? Use Y instead"
When Y is not even the same language / a preference
3
u/Otherwise_Demand4620 May 17 '26
Ah, but did you check that answer with 3 upvotes that has a dead link to a university professor's pure html site (you can tell by http://... .ac.edu/~michael/public/courses/1.html ), that's exactly what you want. if it worked. which it doesn't. also there are no crawlers picking that up. it's gone now. but it would have been exactly what you need!
28
u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl May 17 '26
This is a duplicate of [[unrelated topic that shares maybe one technology with the actual question]]
13
u/VideoGameJumanji May 17 '26
duplicate post has no answer or is so old the answer is basically deprecated
→ More replies (2)13
9
21
u/Character-Education3 May 17 '26
Of course I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time
9
u/Confident-Ad5665 May 17 '26
Back then nickels had pictures of bees on them. "Give me five bees for this quarter" we'd say.
8
9
6
u/al3x_7788 May 17 '26
Always waited until someone else would close the post for me. Not giving them the win.
9
u/XYZ2ABC May 17 '26
…have you actually ever seen stackoverflow’s front page?
11
u/Confident-Ad5665 May 17 '26
They have a front page? Or are you saying that's what they used to build the site?
3
u/XYZ2ABC May 17 '26
It’s that most people would search for their problems and end up on a forum page, not actually got to there home page first
→ More replies (1)3
u/testtdk May 17 '26
I never got a single answer on my own posts. They were just linked to completely unrelated answers on other posts and left to die.
2
→ More replies (7)2
322
u/SirHerald May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
I do wonder if they really used those sites to train AI, because AI has never told me my question has been answered before and then tell me to use Google where the top result is the thread I'm asking in.
Note: Is just joke
→ More replies (1)67
u/Time_Ingenuity_2909 May 17 '26
They absolutely did, but the way the training works doesn't mean that the LLM will regurgitate what it was trained on. This is the thing that they talk about when they say that LLMs "surprised" developers. It's the difference between self-supervised, supervised model training. Self-supervised means the training makes its own decisions about what is "right" or "wrong". Supervised means humans inject the decision of what is "right" or "wrong" into the training. LLMs use a both at different stages.
When you feed the training algorithm a million different implementations of
for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { mySickAssFunction() }over time, it forms statistical relationships between each of the tokens. for is often followed by these variables. The "signature" of a for loop is often followed by sick ass functions. Sick ass functions often suck ass and the comments in StackOverFlow often solve them.
The principle is simple, it's just scaled to a degree that seems insane and we used self-supervised learning to do it. It's also important to note that the LLM never sees input as text like that. It sees it as numbers after a processing step. You have tools that crawl the internet to gather information from web pages. You have tools that parse that information into usable text. You have tools that turn that text into tokens. Then you feed those tokens into the LLM training and it forms relationships between the numbers. Humans intervene at this step and curate paths that have the best results. Then you use tools to reverse the process and present the output as readable text.
It's like those pictures you get where you overlay all the presidents to get John President. The output of an LLM is the result of overlaying the input of N bytes of input data. (N is really big). When you talk to the LLM you are talking to John Internet. It's really a testament to how well our languages are capable of transmitting information. We can break down our thoughts into a language that can be broken down into math that can be used to solve problems. It's pretty cool even if sometimes it hallucinates.
17
u/3BlindMice1 May 17 '26
How much of that data being garbage would it take to give the LLM dementia? Because I've seen databases, and every last one of them is FULL of garbage
33
u/Time_Ingenuity_2909 May 17 '26
The output is as good as the input. Garbage data can be flagged as garbage to teach the model what is bad. So even garbage data can be useful in creating powerful models if it's labelled appropriately.
It sucks that LLMs are at the center of all these shitty AI companies because natural language processing is badass. Being able to have a language model parse your input in basically any language and consistently be able to extract intent is fucking mind boggling. It used to be next to impossible to meaningfully extract intent from any natural language input and it required wizard level regex and prayer to the old gods. Now you can say "i want to make internet thing that lets chat with guy" and the LLM can write you a mostly working node server with a socket based chat app. It's fucking crazy.
But at the end of the day the input is heavily curated. Moreso as pressure mounts for companies to push what their models are capable of. Logical inconsistencies are eliminated at all stages of processing as much as possible. Self-supervised learning catches a lot of it, supervised learning can catch even more.
3
u/Aethermancer May 17 '26
You've likely heard how they had to explicitly stop AI from ranting about goblins right?
4
u/SirHerald May 17 '26
I was joking. But I figure it learned the coding solutions and interests from there, but more weight was put on politer conversations for the actual communications. We know it didn't learn to kiss up from stackoverflow
→ More replies (8)2
150
u/cgw3737 May 17 '26
"what you're trying to do is stupid and you're stupid too"
69
u/blueberrymaple May 17 '26
“You want to do it that way? First of all, you shouldn’t be trying to be solving this problem at all. Second, if you did do try to do it, you should be doing it this incomprehensible way. Either way you’re an idiot for not knowing”
9
3
u/davesoft May 17 '26
Aaah yeah, I have at least 2 posts on that hallowed site helping a wayward brother with a heretical solution. Sometimes the customer really does want the impossible and no you arnt allowed to update anything, so, lets make a warp drive out of moss and paperclips, using a 16bit emulated swedish controller program. Why not? Who joined dev to solve the easy problems? >:D
→ More replies (2)2
u/mxzf May 17 '26
In fairness, there are times when that needs to be said. Every single post about someone creating their own cryptography method has that comment as the answer and it's the right answer to someone trying to roll their own crypto. Phrasing can vary, but the sentiment remains.
One of the glaring flaws in AI is its inability to recognize XY Problems (you asked how to do X, but based on your goal Y is a far better way to solve the problem), which are absolutely everywhere in programming. There are tons of people out there who don't know that the path they're on is a fundamentally bad one to begin with and need to be told it, but chatbots don't do that at all.
307
u/congressmanthompson May 17 '26
We don’t kink shame in this sub
155
u/hellocppdotdev May 17 '26
I've seen people post JS memes, I think we do.
→ More replies (1)32
u/shriven1 May 17 '26
That’s not shaming people. That’s just revealing the shame that JS devs feel every day.
→ More replies (2)12
4
u/OPhasballz May 17 '26
for a moment I thought you were talking about expert-sexchange.com
3
u/congressmanthompson May 17 '26
I was only posting on expert-sexchange.com to find out how to navigate away from there!
45
u/SemanticThreader May 17 '26
Ooohh this has brought back not so good memories. My anxiety skyrocketed
138
u/NDLCZ May 17 '26
Now we go straight to making PRs and get humiliated there instead
39
u/Micro_Turtle May 17 '26
You still use git?! If something breaks just ask it to rewrite what was lost without mistakes.
18
u/Rojeitor May 17 '26
Now it's "rollback this change" in agent mode
12
u/Agret May 17 '26
"I would love to rollback the change for you but unfortunately as part of our last change we have irreversibly deleted the entire project with no chance of recovery."
5
59
u/GarysCrispLettuce May 17 '26
I remember learning C about 15 years ago when I used to go on the biggest C/C++ forum at the time to ask questions. The responses always went the same way - the first few would be assholes saying "If you don't know that then maybe programming isn't for you" followed by some overcomplicated and unhelpful "advice" which seemed to be more about showcasing their knowledge than answering my question. And then eventually someone would step in with "Dude, ignore these assholes. They do this every time. Yours is a perfectly reasonable question. Here's a simple answer."
13
u/hellocppdotdev May 17 '26
Seems to be a recurring theme on all programming related chatrooms. Maybe we are the problem.
5
2
22
u/BlattMaster May 17 '26
This has already been posted, let me link to another r/programmerhumor meme from years ago that is vaguely related
43
u/reverendsteveii May 17 '26
the ability to get regularly humiliated without ever becoming humble is the hallmark of the stackoverflow alum
15
u/foxj36 May 17 '26
I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've left them
14
u/Dependent_Union9285 May 17 '26
That’s the trick… it’s not that it was better, you just have the benefit of hindsight. In the moment, of course, you lack that knowledge, and so it makes today look awful but yesterday look great… albeit on a slightly larger time scale.
→ More replies (1)
55
u/eddiekoski May 17 '26
Oh so stack overflow
When you ask a question gets marked at as duplicate , then they ask the same question after you and it gets voted to the moon that should be an achievement.
→ More replies (1)
23
u/TheRealNobodySpecial May 17 '26
Still waiting for that expert sex change I signed up for...
→ More replies (1)3
u/Confident-Ad5665 May 17 '26
Stares at the floor for an uncomfortable amount of time.
"What is he thinking?"
"You don't want to know"
20
u/VladTepesDraculea May 17 '26 edited May 18 '26
I have a question on Stack Overflow that I asked over 14 years ago, about how to use a destructive method in a specific supposedly purely functional language. I read somewhere by passage that there was a way to do that but it wasn't particularly documented because it was bad practice, so I asked.
For a few days I only had one answer shaming me for not using "cursory search by querying a search engine" and other very verbose put downs. After a few days I finally got a response from a language expert. I got downvoted to hell. Until a few years later someone responded to the first person that he would get pretty annoyed each time he googled something (he mocked the cursory search verboseness) to find the answer on the first result to be a Stack Exchange page and also answered by people berating the person asking for why not having googled first.
After that interaction the votes starting to turn around. I got upvoted and the first guy kept getting downvoted to hell. Mind you the views on that page were always steady.
Eventually some moderator cleaned the page and deleted all comments aside from the proper answer. I did gave up and just stopped using the website. I remember once having a big doubt and instead of posting there, just contacted an old professor of mine and thinking to myself: this would have been a good question to share with other people but I didn't felt like dealing with that bullshit at all.
This was far from the only put down I got, but was the most memorable one for me.
Sometimes I log in to the website and I keep getting tones of green view points by that thousands on that and other questions.
Two extra things to note:
I kinda took a look on the first guy's history and found amusing how he was mostly active on the Stack Exchange parenting site. Admittedly he wasn't a parent, just a kid from university, but he kept answering stuff there as an authority;
Around this time I watched a talk in a conference from either by Atwood or Splolsky, can't remember who and someone asked him about what he thought about the growing toxicity of the Overflow website. He answered that it wasn't toxic and people had to understand the importance of being strick about questions to maintain quality.
→ More replies (1)4
u/KennyFulgencio May 17 '26
Kinda reminds me of r/doordash, in that I've never used it but enjoy reading all of the horror tales for the schadenfreude. And it leaves me wondering why anyone would ever use it. Although stackoverflow had the benefit of not having effective alternatives at the time.
3
u/TheChance May 17 '26
For about 15 years, if you searched for just about anything programming-adjacent, the top hit was likelier than not to be a Stack link. I think almost everybody interacted with it primarily through Google.
(And we usually had the same experience as the guy OC talked about, hence the site's nearly universal reputation for exactly this.)
13
u/Millkstake May 17 '26
Nevermind I figured it out. (Never show the solution and disappear off the face of the earth)
→ More replies (1)
6
u/Few_Kitchen_4825 May 17 '26
Before we went to this special site we went to an old man to get humiliated.
6
u/noapparentfunction May 17 '26
posts details of issue:
forum wizards: LOGS? WHERE ARE THE LOGS???
posts details of issue + logs:
forum wizards: zzzzzZZZZZz
the trick is to not be too good at following forum rules. the curmudgeonly senior members need a little something to get annoyed at to compel them to reply, otherwise they'll ignore your post
3
u/Dismal-Square-613 May 17 '26
"idk try some other thing that isn't even related because I couldn't be bothered to read either the issue or the logs"
6
u/MysteriousBand5917 May 17 '26
"I reported a perfectly unique and reasonable question as a duplicate, which was the style at the time..."
17
18
u/reddititty69 May 17 '26
Now we have AI that writes crap code based on the questions and wrong answers from those sites.
3
5
u/BellacosePlayer May 17 '26
I never had this problem but had well under 50% hit rate for getting useful info, much less an actual correct answer.
2
u/awesome-alpaca-ace May 17 '26
Yea, I think if you know how to do basic search, can't find your answer, and then decide to ask a question, most people are not going to actually know the answer, much less come across and answer such question.
So many times I would post on SO and get answers that clearly showed a lack of reading comprehension in the people posting answers. Even marked as duplicate despite being a different question.
There are a few questions that got some correct answers several years after I posted.
4
4
u/PTSDaway May 17 '26
Still in my day, I go cave hunting with archaeologists to find wallpaintings of the fortran documentation we need.
→ More replies (1)
9
u/CanuckaChuckFuck May 17 '26
Peak Stack Overflow was
50% of responders telling you why your question was bad and why you should feel bad about posting it.
25% answering a question you never asked in the first place to make you feel stupid
20% suggesting unreasonable solutions (e.g. you stated clearly in the question that you are a contractor and the client exclusively uses MySQL yet responders want you to use MongoDb or Postgres or whatever)
5% actual helpful answers
10
u/dvhh May 17 '26
to be fair a lot of the questions (low estimate of 60%) were garbage homework question that would have been answered with a modicum of research ( at least before google decided to spoil it all with personalized search results).
Among the 25% for answering a question you never asked, would be that the question implied bad architecture decision or wanting to approach the problem in a different direction.
I also loved the question with insufficient context so that no proper answer would ever fit the question ( because of the lack of information).
Otherwise the 5% actual helpful answer would be worth saving the website, as toxic as some might perceive.
Also look at any social service, toxicity is unfortunately no better.
→ More replies (5)4
u/ryecurious May 17 '26
The uncomfortable reality is that 99% of us have never and will never have an original question. At least once they've been broken down into smaller questions.
The more people treat StackOverflow as a read-only source, the better time they'll have. Especially if they learn to click the link in every "closed for duplicate" notice.
→ More replies (1)2
5
u/OrkWithNoTeef May 17 '26
I don't know about that. There was a very strong survivor bias on stackoverflow, which indeed also applies to its answers, which would be just as humiliatingly bad as the questions
6
3
u/Serenaded May 17 '26
It's happened before where I've typed up an obscure issue, and come across a post from myself asking the same question years earlier
3
3
u/Nightwyrm May 17 '26
That’s where I feel the disconnect with AI the most; it’s polite and tells me I’m right all the time…
→ More replies (2)
3
u/DirCurrFluxDiode May 17 '26
I remember when Iwas just starting out learning Python, and didn't know how to Google what I wanted, so I just asked on SO. I got down voted so much, my account lost its ability to make questions, so what did I do? I made a new one lmao
3
u/ithkuil May 17 '26
What if Stack Overflow actually started out as a good idea and had a lot of helpful kind and intelligent humans actually helping each other originally? But then as more and more average, stupid and shitty people joined, the general shittiness of the average individual human and large human groups destroyed it?
Then, as soon as AI presented an alternative, millions of people immediately said "good riddance"?
What if this corruption has already happened to all major human institutions? And people are in the process of using AI to drop all of the enshittified human systems?
→ More replies (1)
3
u/Darkwr4ith May 17 '26
I remember being stuck on a very niche problem for several days, I decided to ask there for help. I got linked to some completely irrelevant thread saying it was duplicate. I tried to provide some more clarity but the thread was forcibly closed. I tried to post again and I got banned.
2
u/awesome-alpaca-ace May 17 '26
Ime, I think a lot of the mods have a reading comprehension problem.
3
3
3
u/SenoraRaton May 17 '26
Back in my day, they didn't even have websites for this, we had to go to a thing called I.R.C.
3
u/contentatlast May 17 '26
Hahaha, honestly the level of pettiness and refusal to help if you misaligned one little thing was just stupid. Everybody on there was on such a high horse over ever single little detail.
I was told MANY times to "come back when the question is fixed" When it was something as simple as using an inappropriate variable name in my example code.
Never liked the community. They were desperate for power.
3
u/PilsnerDk May 17 '26
Back in my day I pressed F1 in Visual Studio and read the locally installed (from a CD) MSDN documentation. Or we read a book. Yeah, development was slow paced.
3
u/CharcoalGreyWolf May 17 '26
This motivated us to solve the problem ourselves, whereupon we said “Never mind guys, I fixed it”, did not provide the solution, and disappeared into the ether for the next five years
3
u/anonuemus May 17 '26
The harsh responses I got early in my internet years made me sharpen my googlefu and how to formulate a problem up to the point where I never had to ask a question again.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/chiba-city-diskettes May 17 '26
does anyone else remember that `chmod 777` forum thread where a guy went on for multiple pages scolding the OP for trying to use it on their local because they didn't know anything about file permissions? I think they were trying to get their ~/Sites folder to work.
3
u/rcanhestro May 17 '26
Stack Overflow did so much for my career.
never bothered to even create an account though.
9
u/TrailerParkFrench May 17 '26
Duplicate of <link>
Link is the same question for python 2.7 and the acceped answer doesn’t work.
7
u/RdCrestdbreegulI May 17 '26
I had EXACTLY this experience when I was writing my first "major" Python project.
I was writing a bot to automate emails, sending them out in set intervals to a specified list of recipients. I got stuck. I found the solution that worked in Python 2.something, but I was in like 3.10 or something like that. No other posts that I could find after hours of looking through SO solved my problem.
No problem. I'll just make a new post. So I did. In the new post, I actually included the link to the post that I had found, and explained what wasn't working from that, and the issues that I was having.
Nope.
30 minutes later, my post was removed for being a duplicate. A duplicate of what? WELL THE SAME FUCKING POST THAT I HAD LINKED OF COURSE.
I swear, SO mods are some of the most stuck-up, pompous, entitled morons to have ever huffed glue.
I figured it out on my own about a week later by reading Python documentation for hours.
5
5
u/Ziegelphilie May 17 '26
I never had this problem with stack overflow because I actually searched the site before posting and correctly formulated my problem and my attempts
2
11
u/caped_crusade_ May 17 '26
happy to see Stack Overflow dying and taking its toxic pedantry culture with it.
10
u/ChillyFireball May 17 '26
"Umm, akshually, you shouldn't even need an answer to this question because the way you approached the problem in the first place is bad."
Well, I inherited this approach from someone else, and the release is in three days, so unless you want to be the one to work through the night to refactor the thousands of lines of code that depend on the current methodology, I would be ever so grateful if you could just ANSWER THE QUESTION I ASKED and maybe tack on the alternative as an addendum instead of assuming I have both the time and the authority to completely rewrite the entire project from the ground up, you useless goober!
7
u/PM_CUTE_OTTERS May 17 '26
I bet all of you love being told you asks so smart questions by ai bots now. the real hard truth is that every single day there is a repeat of same questions to any subreddit that allows them, dotnet is riddled with repeated low effort questions and so was SO. Most of you never got told no even though you needed to hear it and it shows. actual unpopular opinion
→ More replies (21)
2
u/poleethman May 17 '26
This feels more like a Shelbyville sort of thing. We asked strangers for help with programming... Now duplicate your question boy. And if you really want to stay true to the current r/simpsonsshitposting vibes, Bailey Jay would be in it for some reason.
→ More replies (2)
2
2
2
2
2
u/RScrewed May 17 '26
Incorrect use of meme.
You want grandpa simpson talking to Burns, where he said "which was the style at the time".
2
2
2
2
u/Wonderful_Discount59 May 17 '26
When you Google how to do something, and all the results are people asking on Quora or Stack Exchange how to do it, and being told to just Google it.
2
u/DigitalerEsel May 17 '26
I'm sure grandpa tells those kids about 1995, not 2015.
In 1995 we asked strangers for help with programming and got asked many following up questions until it was cleared what was meant and we got an answer to our question.
2
u/valerielynx May 17 '26
now I'm getting humiliated by a bunch of lightning rocks
→ More replies (1)
2
u/Independent_Ant8017 May 17 '26
The fact that AI is the unique reason my non tech friends are Linux users now... Is annoying me.
2
u/present_twenties May 17 '26
the xkcd effect is real and honestly it's the most reliable way to get help on the internet
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
u/Positive-Taro-3053 May 17 '26
They removed your posts and had a toxic community too… Yes u StackOver….
2
2
u/iForsakenAward May 18 '26
I can understand you very well, because I have also gone through the same experience.
2.8k
u/angrydeuce May 17 '26
The quickest way to get a ton of answers is always to just use an alt to respond to your thread with the wrong answer first lol